Hypothetical Arrangements

what we can’t see

rules us

not unlike

a meowing kitty cat

“The observation of devotion could finish you…

                                 –Erín Moure, Pillage Laud

The act of going to performances occupies a bit of an obsessive and irrational space in my life. I liken it to ritual tied in with a sense of yearning and loneliness. There are feelings of uncertainty. Thus, when British choreographer, Sarah Michelson says: “People need faith. You can’t argue if faith exists. It’s here,” near the end of the Devotion Study #1 – The American Dancer, it resonates with me. I succumb.”

My response to Sarah Michelson’s Devotion Study #1 – The American Dancer at The Whitney Biennial on Idiom. Special thanks to James Wagner, Barry Hoggard, and Hannah Daly.

**Photo: Paula Court

“When writing about performance, I often feel caught between the body and the word. To attach language to bodies and movement is a complicated matter, calling into question the way words, grammar and syntax codify and enforce the body. A tinge of violence underlies this act of writing — a sort of pinning down of that which is constantly changing. More than a trace, writing marks the body.

I hesitate. I question. Racial identities within performance are too complicated to be pared down to the words black dance…”

My collaborative piece with Siobhan Burke on Platform 2012: Parallels, curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones at Danspace Project on Hyperallergic Weekend. Special thanks to Claudia La Rocco

**Photo: Ian Douglas

There’s shame in our passion and passion in our shame.  Feelings may drag across the desert before being acknowledged or wanted. When these two women hold each other there is tenderness and vitality and a strenuous agenda. The love is there and vacant. It brews…

My response to Molly Lieber + Eleanor Smith: Beautiful Bone on The Performance Club.

**Photo: Brian Rogers

poetryinlotion:

                                For ks, always & again

 

You get ideas and I do the heavy lifting

Or maybe that was Cuba talking

Shit in one hand, wish with the other…

I mean, how do you stand it?

I care nothing for rules

Dirty little tramp cocktail

But, you know, some people:

It just doesn’t come naturally to them

I’m going on my lunch break

I’ll take yours, too           

Modern-day mythology                it takes some getting used to

Darling. Don’t you know?

I do my best thinking on my feet

My insights are fueled by need

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I will not remember, only describe.
This is the first time I’ve really wanted to be accurate.

                                   —Lisa Robertson, “Face/”



The women form rows


Lingering variations, slightly layered
it is noon


A crouch
delicate bend at the knee


How a painting’s low rumble patiently exists


Why do we need the experimental feminine?


What is necessity in relationship to due time?


I don’t know of many changes


Start over swimmingly if not backwards and through


Part of their bodies are over the silver lines
like an imaginary, rotating system


It is impossible to maintain a mirror image


Even though the ground is slippery


Women who are with each other belong
as in being long


I can see what’s the same with stern yet minimal grace
all the more rolling


As bodies become each other’s witnesses so do I


Symmetry can be purposefully


Difference is a circle, unfurling

History is nothing other than the infinitely intricate present that surrounds us—the panoply of residues and effects, accidental and chosen—that adorn and litter the landscape of our desires.                                                                
                                                  —Joan Retallack, “The Experimental Feminine”

I stick my tongue in it to try to stop it 

 faster 

The temporal feminine sticks to it

A mosaic

of facts abruptly

Makes the body disappear over time. 

Stick my tongue in it

The impatient lover

Reclining fast and then slow

Like an instance of recognition 

Lovely freak unwind this love

**Image: Nan Goldin, Swan-like embrace, Paris, 2010, Chromogenic print, 30 x 40 inches; 76 x 102 cm.     

What follows a strict chronology has no memory.

          —Lyn Hejinian, My Life

Longing produces modes of both belonging and ‘being long’ or persisting over time.

          —Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

November 10, 2011                                                                                     

To begin

To begin in time

To imagine alternatives

As forms of doubt and curiosity

As persistent restlessness

As a form of resistance

Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly

Reusable Parts/Endless Love

Homage/critique

Begins and begins again

In 2010, Gerard and Kelly encountered Tino Sehgal’s Kiss at the Guggenheim. Drawn to both its physical and ephemeral nature, as well as Seghal’s consistently heteronormative casting, Gerard and Kelly visited the piece several times to create an audio score of the work, “notating the dancers’ movements as accurately as possible and in real time. We deciphered the work consisted of a roughly 12-minute choreography, performed on a loop.”

An other is a possibility, isn’t it.

           —Lyn Hejinian, My Life

Initial performances that stemmed from the recording consisted of reenactments with the heterosexual couple replaced by same-sex pairs and trios. However, Gerard and Kelly didn’t want to “simply swap one representation for another” a seemingly superficial response that parallels the all-too familiar gay-friendly trend to “normalize” or “equalize” queer lifestyles without challenging the status quo that excluded them in the first place. Reusable Parts/Endless Love is not a reenactment of Sehgal’s work, but a queer critique of notions of progress, a reconstructed system, an experiment of the body in time.

Experienced as an installation, spectators move in and around five partitions composed of two mobile walls meeting at right angles. Cylindrical speakers suspended by copper wires hang in a grid-like pattern over the floor. The moving spectator becomes part of the work. Time is not marked in seconds, minutes or linear narrative, but the mere repetition of language and movement.

“His hands on her lower back.”

“She’s straddling his right thigh.”

“Hand on her crotch.”

“Three steps…and she’s crawling towards him.”

Observation becomes text. Text becomes score. And score is transformed into movement. After three dancers (Yves Laris Cohen, Jose Tena and Roger Prince) have created their own scores, a fourth dancer, devynn emory, steps in to observe and record the movements of the three dancers. This generates a new 12-minute score, which is then performed as a duet watched by two other dancers. New duets are formed and new scores are generated.

We are caught in a recursive loop. Time slows, stammers…falters. The highly systematic approach feels senseless amidst the heaving and determined bodies in the room. No longer am I trying to follow the rules of the system, rather feel time’s effects; its tactility reverberating in my psyche. Gender roles are reversed. Genders meld into one another and expand upon each other. Intimacy reveals itself in repetition with variation. The present signifies not a continuation of the past, but a series of layers—an accumulation. Time does not signify progression, but an investigative poetics of bodies in space.

Gerard and Kelly cast a marvelous group of dancers, all of who possess distinct identities that antagonize society’s restrictive gender binary. Cohen, a transgender performer, opens the Thursday night performance by reciting Gerard and Kelly’s recording (via headphones) as accurately as possible, including all the slips, hesitations, and elongations, into a recording device. He has a powerful presence, bearing an uncanny similarity to a play-by-play announcer. As soon as he finishes recording, it is played back while he follows his own instruction, enacting both the “he” and the “she” of Sehgal’s Kiss. His movements are confident and mesmerizing to watch as he exhibits both a sense of ownership and estrangement in relationship to the words that surround him—familiar in that it is his voice, unfamiliar in its duel-gendered content. In an opposite corner, Tena’s speech is gentler and softer than Cohen’s. Language and movement are layered on top of one another to create a repetition with variation, a strange and seductive stutter.

Where Sehgal’s dramatically drawn-out Kiss elongates chronology, Reusable Parts/Endless Love expands and twists it—queers it, suggesting that our bodily experience are the basis of our memories and identity. Reusable Parts/Endless Love privileges intimacy and our physical relationships with our bodies over maximum capitalist production. Emotions like passion, desire, empathy, and affection do not abide by the same rhythms as the 9-to-5 “work time” rather adopt a psychic space that has no predetermined logic or system.  

Because of my body

In the absence of system

(It is both in ruins and still under construction)

          —Lisa Robertson, R’s boat

In the end, a recording from one of the microphones used to generate one of the new scores is played back into the headphones of all the dancers. An uncomfortable silence pervades the room. The sounds of heavy breathing, falling, and the friction of cloth and carpet replace the multi-layered text scores. I am on the verge of tears. I am enthralled.

Not the sum of parts

But permutations

Of bodily rhythms

Imagine alternatives

As substitute for progress

Bodies and boundaries blur

We have yet to begin…






**Special thanks to Austin Alter.